The Philosopher's Apprentice (27 page)

The New Year was not long under way when Amory and Claudius died. I glanced at the bookcase and there they lay, two dry and delicate corpses, recumbent in the bottom of the fishbowl. Their passing perplexed me. Hadn't I given them plenty of water to drink? A surfeit of leaves to nibble? Evidently their little orthopterous clocks had simply stopped. I wrapped the grasshoppers in a white handkerchief, bore them to our rooftop garden, and buried them beneath the philodendron.

Shortly after 5:00
P.M
., we heard from our fetus again. He'd left a message on Natalie's voice mail, explaining that he'd used the ATM card for several notable purchases, including a cell phone and
a kerosene heater. He wanted us to visit him. His home was an abandoned switch tower in the freight yard adjacent to South Station.

“Please come,” he said. “It's quite important.” A long pause. “I believe I'm very sick.”

Possessed by some raw Darwinian instinct, as primal as
Danaus plexippus
's need to pollinate, we sprinted to the parking garage, scrambled into the Subaru, and set out in quest of our fetus. Reaching South Station at the height of rush hour, we exploited the hurly-burly and the gathering gloom to climb unseen off the platform and make our way across six parallel sets of tracks. My heart pounded frantically, though I couldn't say how much of this internal percussion owed to my fear of our being arrested, how much to my anxiety over our fetus's health. At some undefined point, we crossed from Amtrak's realm into the freight yard. Tank cars, hopper cars, boxcars, reefers, and gondolas loomed out of the darkness like prehistoric beasts straining to escape a tar pit.

Thanks to our heavy-duty flashlight supplemented by a full moon, we had no trouble spotting the deserted switch tower, a warped and weathered structure reminiscent of Charnock's houseboat. I knocked on the door, half expecting to be greeted by a shrouded skeleton in the ectoplasmic employ of the long-defunct Boston & Maine Railroad, but no one answered. A rickety exterior staircase led to the upper level, where a faint light seeped through the sooty windows. Natalie and I exchanged pained glances and ascended to the observation platform, one wobbly step at a time. I merely had to nudge the door and it swung open, its hinges creaking like an
Inner Sanctum
sound effect.

Strewn with scraps of wood, chunks of plaster, and bits of broken glass, the room was dimly illuminated by an electric lantern whose battery was almost dead. The back wall displayed a faded but elaborate chart depicting the freight yard, each switch circled and numbered, below which our netherson lay shivering on a stained, unsheeted mattress. A down comforter enswathed his body. His newly
purchased kerosene heater, an upright thrumming cylinder suggesting an incandescent barber pole, released ineffectual gasps of humidity. Discarded wrappers and packages littered the floor. In recent weeks our fetus had treated himself to Ring Dings, Twinkies, Tootsie Rolls, Triscuits, Slim Jims, Wise potato chips, and Keebler Toll House cookies.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

I extended my hand, cupped his brow. His fever warmed my palm. “Where's the nearest emergency room?” I asked Natalie.

“Mass General.”

“Listen, Mother,” John Snow 0001 said. “Hear me, Father. I can feel the whole world now. Not just a few things.
Everything.
Isn't that remarkable?”

“We're taking you to the hospital,” I told him.

“Right now,” Natalie added.

The icy air made specters of our breath.

“The twitchings in my stomach, I
know
that's hunger,” the immaculoid said. “And the fire inside my body, it must be a fever.”

Natalie asked, “Can you walk? Should we carry you?”

John Snow 0001 seized my wrist. “Here's something even stranger. All these words coming out of my mouth—they're the ones I
want
to be speaking.” He relaxed his grip. “A week ago I would've said, ‘You're taking me to the hospital? Sure you don't want to get out your curette and slaughter me all over again?'”

Acting in unspoken but complete accord, my wife and I crouched over our fetus and unpeeled the comforter. As Natalie slid her arms under his back, I took hold of his legs, and together we lifted him several inches off the mattress.

“No!” he screamed. “It hurts too much!”

We set him back down.

“What hurts?” Natalie asked.

“Everything.”

“We would never hurt you on purpose,” Natalie said.

“I know, Mother. Before, I would've said, ‘You certainly hurt me on purpose when you lanced me like a boil.'”

Natalie shuddered.

“The paramedics have painkillers,” I told our fetus, slipping the phone from my jacket pocket. “They'll give you a shot of Demerol, then rush you to the hospital in their ambulance.”

With the suddenness of a frog gigging a dragonfly, John Snow 0001 snatched the phone away and hugged it to his chest. “I can picture it all in my mind. Sharp and clear, like a leaf floating on still water.”

“Picture what?”

“My entire race. The mackies. Moving against the city.”

“What city?” I asked. “Boston?”

Before he could answer, a coughing fit seized him, the gouts of breath bursting from his windpipe along with a sprinkle of saliva. Natalie reached into the rubble and retrieved a half-liter 7-Up bottle. She gave our fetus a foamy gulp of warm soda. He coughed again, bathing us in carbonated spray, then took a second gulp. Sucking in a deep breath, he squeezed my hand and looked me in the eye.

“Themisopolis,” he said. “The place where they perform the abortions.”

“The immaculoids will attack Themisopolis?” I asked.

“And you know something?” he said, nodding. “I'm not…what's the word? I'm not
jealous.
” He coughed. “The other mackies will get to join the crusade, but I'll be too sick to go”—cough—“and I don't
care.
What they're planning to do”—cough—“it's
wrong.
Gasoline and firebrands, that's simply
wrong.
”

“Gasoline?” I said.

“And firebrands.”

“When does the crusade start?” Natalie asked.

“Soon, they told us,” our fetus replied.

“
Who
told you?” I asked. “Enoch Anthem? Felix Pielmeister?”

“What I really want to know is how Amory and Claudius are doing.”

“They're doing fine,” Natalie said.

“We love them very much,” I said.

A tremor passed through his body, and then came a series of overlapping vibrations, a seismic dying for our netherson. Natalie and I threw ourselves atop the creature, massaging his muscles with taut, nervous fingers, as if we were making John Snow 0001 all over again, sculpting him from an immense lump of clay.

“Can I”—cough—“ask you a question?”

Natalie's tears glistened in the lantern's sallow glow. “Of course.”

“What is it like”—cough—“to be alive?”

I grimaced and winced. Tenured philosophers have a taste for grandiose questions, and failed philosophers relish them even more. What is it like to be a bat? What if our senses disclose only the shadows of reality? What if our language prevents us from thinking the most important thoughts of all? But my skull was empty just then, a grail devoid of wine, water, or any other useful fluid. I could not have said what it was like to boil an egg, much less to be alive.

“City on fire!” our fetus cried. “Jehovah's holy torch!”

Even as Natalie and I tightened our grip on John Snow 0001, we felt his heat leak away in all its forms—first his acute fever, then his normal mammalian warmth, and finally the spark of life, leaving behind only his cold, confected flesh. Natalie pulled her Christmas gift out from beneath her sweatshirt, lifted the twine loop over her head, and placed the foil heart atop our fetus's chest. Evidently she'd grabbed the thing as we were rushing out the door.

“I meant for him to see I had it on,” she said.

“He probably knew we were lying about Amory and Claudius,” I said.

Natalie set her palm on the pendant. “I should've showed it to him and said, ‘I've never stopped wearing it.'”

 

WE STAYED IN THE TOWER
throughout the night, inhaling the fumes of the kerosene heater and talking about John Snow 0001's short, unhappy incarnation. For Natalie his essential tragedy lay in his knowledge that “he was living an unlived life.” He could never escape his realization that his memories were contrived, his opinions programmed, his soul an epiphenomenon of his software. What truly impressed me, by contrast, was his brave and seemingly successful fight against his congenital disconnection from pleasure, so that his final days, miserable though they were by most indices, had included the savor of Ring Dings, the splendor of Twinkies, and the bliss of Triscuits.

“If he'd lived, I wonder, would he have remained sentient?” I asked Natalie.

“We'll never know,” she said, combing her netherson's hair.

With the coming of dawn, we snuck across the freight yard and started down Atlantic Avenue, Natalie leading the way, John Snow 0001 wrapped in the comforter, his sorry husk slung across our shoulders. Our fellow Bostonians took little interest in this strange procession. We must have looked harmless, certainly not miscreants disposing of an inconvenient corpse: perhaps rug merchants delivering a Persian carpet to a Beacon Street penthouse, or archaeologists bearing an ancient scepter to the Boston Museum of Art. We reached the car, opened the trunk, transferred the clutter to the backseat—jumper cables, carton of cheap red wine, bag of potting soil, four empty motor-oil cans—and, after working John Snow 0001's stiffening flesh into a fetal position, snugged him into the compartment.

For the next half-hour, I fled the rising sun, driving aimlessly west, then eased the Subaru into the drive-through lane at a Brookline Burger King. I requested a couple of Egg Croissanwiches and
some coffee, but when the order arrived, neither Natalie nor I could eat a bite. God knows we were hungry. The problem was that the Croissanwiches were so damn tasty, emanating delights that John Snow 0001 had largely been denied.

We slurped down our coffee and resumed our wanderings. Buoyed by the caffeine, we talked about our netherson's vision of a fetal army firebombing Londa's city. An implausible narrative, we decided, but no more implausible than the immaculoids themselves.

“Pielmeister is capable of anything,” I said.

“You really think he would burn Themisopolis?” Natalie said.

“If that's what the paradigm shift requires.”

We visited a Starbucks, consumed more coffee, and changed drivers. Logic said the mortuaries would be open now, and so while Natalie piloted us down Beacon Street, I pulled out the phone and called the West Newton Funeral Home. No sooner had I said the word “immaculoid” than the smarmy proprietor, an
r
-dropping Boston aborigine named Stephen Hammond, assured me that he understood our situation. We were the fourth couple this month to approach him concerning the disposition of such a creature.

“Your predecessors opted for cremation,” he said.

“I see.”

“Simply place the remains in your trunk.”

“We did that already.”

“There's no shame in this, Mr. Ambrose,” Hammond said. “Nobody invited the mackies here.”

The instant we pulled into the mortuary driveway, two pale but sprightly young men came bustling onto the veranda, wearing black serge suits and exuding soft gray sympathy. I hoisted myself out of the wagon and unlocked the trunk. The undertakers acted with exemplary speed. The last I saw of John Snow 0001 was a glimpse of his moldering sneakers as the somber men bore him across a vacant lot toward a squat brick building. A round, tapered chimney
rose from the roof like a candle on a one-year-old's birthday cake.

With a mournful tread Natalie and I mounted the veranda steps and entered the parlor. The place was a reified lie, its fraudulence so stark as to render any postmodern deconstruction superfluous, all ferns and perfumes and uplifting synthesized harp music, when in fact its business was carrion and lamentation. The funeral director materialized from behind a red velvet curtain, introducing himself in the unctuous tones his profession had perfected down through the generations. He conformed surprisingly well to the mental image I'd assembled over the phone: a balding, roly-poly man with a small white mustache like the bristles on a toothbrush.

“Most of our immaculoid families prefer to leave the ashes here,” Stephen Hammond said.

Without consulting me, Natalie said, “We'll take them home.”

“No we won't,” I said.

For a full minute, my wife and I exchanged annoyed glances and indignant throat clearings. Hammond looked away and took a discreet step backward: apparently a customary move for him—doubtless he'd witnessed many such communication breakdowns between quasiparents. It was Natalie who ended the stalemate, taking my hand, drawing it toward her, and pressing my fingers against her sternum.

“I don't ask for many favors, Archimago.”

Fixing my gaze on Hammond, I said, “The ashes will come with us.”

The funeral director returned to our sphere, flashing a major smile. His teeth were enormous. I thought of an egg carton with its lid flipped back. Humming in counterpoint to the ecclesiastical Muzak, he guided us to a display case featuring ceramic urns. Natalie selected one bearing an enameled image of wildflowers, explaining that they reminded her of the habitat our netherson had created for Amory and Claudius.

“The procedure takes ninety minutes,” Hammond said.

About as long as a D and C, I mused. Later I learned that the same thought had occurred to Natalie.